Gnocchi á la Parisienne

Since I got my Kindle for Christmas, I've been reading the book Knives at Dawn, the story of the US team in last years Bocuse d'Or.  I was inspired and thought up this awesome dish in my head and mulled it over before I went to bed pretty much every night last week. I finally gave it a shot...and let's just say I threw it out and we ended up at Stage Left eating a burger that night. Needless to say, I was bummed, and also intimidated about trying this gnocchi recipe on Sunday.

I REALLY needed the confidence. You see, this is one of my favorite dishes at Nicholas. About a year ago, I tried to replicate the recipe a few times. I talked to chefs, asked my foodie friends, and even though I got the basics down, I still failed and it just didn't hit the mark. Here is the post of my previous failure before I had the actual Nicholas recipe. I almost felt like Nicholas in the story he wrote for this recipe about his 'quest' for this airy, pillowy gnocchi.

Sunday comes. At the supermarket we figured we would pick up something for lunch and dinner the next day. Laurie suggested we make chicken tacos with a chili powder that I made. I said, "That's an awesome idea, but let's braise the chicken tonight while cooking the gnocchi, and shred it for the tacos". I improvised a recipe while in the Goya aisle, figuring it's only shredded meat for tacos and nothing could be as bad as my last 'improvisation'. Well, this dish tasted so good, that we scrapped the gnocchi on Sunday night, scrapped the taco idea and ate this awesome improvised chicken dish! I redeemed myself!!! Rick Bayless himself even commented on my recipe/dish! Here is a link to that recipe on my personal blog for those who are interested. What does this have to do with this gnocchi dish? Well, it gave me back my confidence to give it a try tonight! That, and I just wanted to brag about my recipe.

This dish is comprised of a few components, the gnocchi, artichokes, snap peas, and fried leeks, with an artichoke butter sauce made from the artichoke braising liquid/broth. 

We tackled the artichokes first. The recipe calls for making a simple broth with chicken stock and mirepoix, then simmering the artichokes in the broth. The recipe also calls for baby artichokes. I couldn't find any baby artichokes, and I know Alice Waters is putting a spell on me right now....but....

This part was pretty straight forward. I then strained it, reduced, and reserved some of the liquid for the sauce.

Next,  Laurie handled the sugar snap peas...

...While I fried the leeks.

They came out a little darker than I would have liked, but I snacked on these all throughout the night while cooking!

Now, came the fun (or nervous!) part. The gnocchi.

We made the dough (thank god for our Kitchen-Aid). We halved the recipe. 

It's a pretty straightforward Pate a Choux dough with a secret ingredient or two. The hardest part was stirring the milk and flour in the pot for 12 minutes!

We setup our station.

There is one key element that I noticed in Nicholas's recipe that I didn't do the last time I tried to figure this recipe out on my own. That's the temperature in which you cook the gnocchi. I'm not going to give it away...but I will say, this is definitly the secret of this dish.

I don't have pastry bags, so instead, I used some zip-lock sandwich bags to pipe out the gnocchi. This is definitely a two person job.

I actually made a video to show you a few tricks that I figured out to get nice looking gnocchi. 

Check it out!

Here is what they looked like in the pot.

If you don't have one of these 'spiders', drop everything and go pick one up for 2.99 at the asian market. This is one useful tool. 

So far, so good!

Laurie made the artichoke buttersauce that I mentioned earlier, while I finished up the gnocchi in a pan with some oil and butter.

As soon as I saw them in the pan, I KNEW we nailed it.

 

...and we did!

 

One to match the book...

Thoughts: Laurie thinks it's the best dish we've made out of the book so far. We order the gnocchi almost every time we go to Nicholas, and this tasted exactly like it, even with the canned artichokes. The light airyness was spot on and the sauce was really good too. We ended up eating seconds with heaping spoonfuls of the remainder of the sauce (one of the benefits of cooking at home!). I will say, this is a pretty involved dish that takes two people to make it go smoothly. However, we did make this dish, on a Monday night, after working from 7-6, going to the Gym, running, and THEN coming home and cooking. We started at 7:15 and ate at 8:45. My sous-chef and I work awesome together!

Truth be told, we were going to actually go devour the bar menu at Nicholas this week, but a foodie friend of mine invited us to go to Uproot in Warren, so we'll have to wait for Nicholas until next week. I heard rumors of a menu change too...It's a good thing this came out awesome and will hold us over until our next Nicholas fix!

We didn't end up finding the wine pairing, which was a Ribolla Gialla. I really wanted to try this wine. We went to three stores and no one had it. I know a certain friend who is going to email me after I post this and yell at me for not asking him...and I'd like to say, 'I know, I'm sorry', in advance.

Next up: I said seafood the last 4 posts and didn't pull through....so I'm not sure I know what's next yet.

P.S. Laurie and I, in traditional Nicholas fashion, before bed, pulled out some Banana Bread she baked the other night...